I never noticed this before, but the colours are sorta washed out and some of the details can be quite flaky... but mostly I'm concerned about colour-desaturation.

It looks like most of the Youtubers do their own colour correction/add saturation filters to their HD PVR-capped videos to make it look more in-line with what you'd see on an HDTV. I'm a little disappointed that there's no quick-fix saturation/sharpening setting you can tweak with to improve the results - the built-in settings within the ArcSoft software doesn't actually do anything, strangely enough.

He's probably using a Hauppague HD PVR, which I'm getting in 3 days (well, it's mostly for work, but I will also use it to do some personnal reviews).I don't know what Hauppauge you're talking about, but if it's the HD PVR one, it does 1080i, not 1080p (which is very sad). And interlaced sucks. So you'd better be recording in 720p too

Some capture devices do 1080p, such as the Matrix Mini Max 2 (or something like this), Black Magic Shuttle (but you have to have a USB 3.0) and Black Magic Intensity, which is internal.

The other ones are way too expensive for a non-professional use.

For the time being, the Hauppauge HD PVR definitely is the best choice, as long as you can afford it (180 euros / 240 USD)

I'm a little disappointed that there's no quick-fix saturation/sharpening setting you can tweak with to improve the results - the built-in settings within the ArcSoft software doesn't actually do anything, strangely enough.